A J’Ouvert that’s safe for all: How to reform the late night Caribbean carnival

Safety first

My great worry about the upcoming J’Ouvert middle-of-the-night celebration is that thousands of New Yorkers will once again be needlessly exposed to proven, preventable danger in the streets. For a variety of reasons — including sheer political cowardice — too few elected leaders seem willing to challenge or rethink the wisdom of holding an event at 4 a.m. in parts of Brooklyn where gang activity and gunplay are not under control.

Last year was a tragedy. At 2 in the morning, near the start of the J’Ouvert march at Grand Army Plaza, a 24-year-old Bronx man named Denentro Josiah was stabbed to death when, according to reports, he tried to break up a fight. Later, toward the end of the march route near Ebbets Field, 43-year-old Carey Gabay was shot to death at 3:40 a.m., an innocent victim caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between gangsters from rival crews.

That is the predictable consequence of inviting hundreds of thousands of people to drink and carouse in the streets with no clear limits placed on behavior. J’Ouvert, in practice, gives criminals a chance to roam the streets and settle scores, using the darkness, drinking, crowds and costumed revelry as cover.

J’Ouvert City International, the group that has sponsored the event for years, has never bothered to obtain a permit for the parade, although the group receives public money. That changed this year: After NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton rightly denounced the group’s outrageous flouting of city laws and common sense, the group secured a permit.

Bratton has promised to deploy hundreds of additional cops and bright mobile lights to control the event this time. Flyers have been circulated bluntly warning people: “Do not shoot anyone. Do not stab anyone.”

I hope it works.

Just last week in Boston, despite stern warnings and earnest pleas from the city’s mayor and police chief, four separate shootings resulted in two deaths in the hours before that city’s J’Ouvert celebration began.

“This is always a challenging night for us,” Police Chief William Evans said. “We had a lot of extra visibility out there, and we’re trying our best to prevent anyone from getting shot, but unfortunately this event, leading up to it, is a violent night.”

You may be wondering why Boston held J’Ouvert last weekend, while Brooklyn’s will happen in early September. The answer is that all of this midnight revelry in Northeastern cities is a cultural transplant — some would call it an invention from whole cloth — borrowed from Caribbean islands where Mardi Gras carnivals take place in February as a prelude to the religious season of Lent observed by Christians.

The J’Ouvert we see is a “tradition” manufactured in Brooklyn. It can be altered and improved there as well.

As the grandson of Trinidadian immigrants, I fondly remember the J’Ouvert of long ago. With dawn breaking on the morning of the West Indian day carnival, you might hear strange sounds — a patois chant here, a tinkle of steel pan music there — or spot a ghostly figure covered in chalk or ash, darting through the shadowy streets.

Done properly, J’Ouvert creates a wonderful, uncanny feeling worth celebrating and preserving — but not at the cost of giving criminals cover to inflict death and injury.

Many New York cultural festivals have been scarred by violence. In the 1990s, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani fought mightily to rein in the drunken, rowdy excess of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, especially after an 18-year-old high school senior named Michael Sarti was beaten and kicked, and later died of his injuries.

The St. Patrick’s Day Parade hasn’t been tamed completely: As late as March 2015, a viral video showed a half-dozen men rumbling in the streets in Midtown. “They must come from single-parent homes,” deadpanned a writer from The Root, a black news publication, cherishing the opportunity to call middle-aged white men thugs.

Back in 2000, the hours following the Puerto Rican Day Parade were marred by hooligans who groped, harassed and assaulted women in Central Park — mayhem that led to dozens of arrests and 18 convictions, along with hundreds of thousands of public dollars paid to women who sued the city for not keeping things under control.

Parade organizers and law enforcement got serious about safety, which markedly improved after those traumatic events. We’ll see if the leaders and boosters of J’Ouvert can say the same after Labor Day.